IDaaS Access Management

A fast-growing market, IDaaS AM is largely characterized by cloud-based delivery of access management capabilities for business irrespective of the application and service delivery models. Improved time-to-value proposition prioritizes adoption of IDaaS for B2B, B2E and B2C access management use-cases, helping IDaaS AM to dominate new IAM purchases globally. This Leadership Compass discusses the market direction and provides a detailed evaluation of market players to offer necessary guidance for IAM and security leaders to make informed decisions.

Methodology

About KuppingerCole's Leadership Compass

KuppingerCole Leadership Compass is a tool which provides an overview of a particular IT market segment and identifies the leaders in that market segment. It is the compass which assists you in identifying the vendors and products/services in a market segment which you should consider for product decisions.

It should be noted that it is inadequate to pick vendors based only on the information provided within this report.

Customers must always define their specific requirements and analyze in greater detail what they need. This report doesn’t provide any recommendations for picking a vendor for a specific customer scenario. This can be done only based on a more thorough and comprehensive analysis of customer requirements and a more detailed mapping of these requirements to product features, i.e. a complete assessment.

Types of Leadership

As part of our evaluation of products in this Leadership Compass, we look at four leadership types:

Product Leaders: Product Leaders identify the leading-edge products in the particular market segment. These products deliver to a large extent what we expect from products in that market segment. They are mature.

Market Leaders: Market Leaders are vendors which have a large, global customer base and a strong partner network to support their customers. A lack in global presence or breadth of partners can prevent a vendor from becoming a Market Leader.

Innovation Leaders: Innovation Leaders are those vendors which are driving innovation in the market segment. They provide several of the most innovative and upcoming features we hope to see in the market segment.

Overall Leaders: Overall Leaders are identified based on a combined rating, looking at the strength of products, the market presence, and the innovation of vendors. Overall Leaders might have slight weaknesses in some areas but become an Overall Leader by being above average in all areas.

For every leadership type, we distinguish between three levels of products:

Leaders: This identifies the Leaders as defined above. Leaders are products which are exceptionally strong in particular areas.

Challengers: This level identifies products which are not yet Leaders but have specific strengths which might make them Leaders. Typically, these products are also mature and might be leading-edge when looking at specific use cases and customer requirements.

Followers: This group contains products which lag behind in some areas, such as having a limited feature set or only a regional presence. The best of these products might have specific strengths, making them a good or even the best choice for specific use cases and customer requirements but are of limited value in other situations.

Our rating is based on a broad range of input and long experience in a given market segment. Input consists of experience from KuppingerCole advisory projects, feedback from customers using the products, product documentation, and a questionnaire sent out before creating the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass, as well as other sources.

Product rating

KuppingerCole as an analyst company regularly conducts evaluations of products/services and vendors. The results are, among other types of publications and services, published in the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass Reports, KuppingerCole Executive Views, KuppingerCole Product Reports, and KuppingerCole Vendor Reports. KuppingerCole uses a standardized rating to provide a quick overview of our perception of the products or vendors. Providing a quick overview of the KuppingerCole rating of products requires an approach combining clarity, accuracy, and completeness of information at a glance.

KuppingerCole uses the following categories to rate products:

Security

Functionality

Integration

Interoperability

Usability

Security – security is measured by the degree of security within the product. Information Security is a key element and requirement in the KuppingerCole Analysts IT Model. Thus, providing a mature approach to security and having a well-defined internal security concept are key factors when evaluating products. Shortcomings such as having no or only a very coarse-grained, internal authorization concept are understood as weaknesses in security. Known security vulnerabilities and hacks are also understood as weaknesses. The rating then is based on the severity of such issues and the way a vendor deals with them.

Functionality – this is measured in relation to three factors. One is what the vendor promises to deliver. The second is the status of the industry. The third factor is what KuppingerCole would expect the industry to deliver to meet customer requirements. In mature market segments, the status of the industry and KuppingerCole expectations usually are virtually the same. In emerging markets, they might differ significantly, with no single vendor meeting the expectations of KuppingerCole, thus leading to relatively low ratings for all products in that market segment. Not providing what customers can expect on average from vendors in a market segment usually leads to a degradation of the rating, unless the product provides other features or uses another approach which appears to provide customer benefits.

Integration – integration is measured by the degree in which the vendor has integrated the individual technologies or products in their portfolio. Thus, when we use the term integration, we are referring to the extent to which products interoperate with themselves. This detail can be uncovered by looking at what an administrator is required to do in the deployment, operation, management, and discontinuation of the product. The degree of integration is then directly related to how much overhead this process requires. For example: if each product maintains its own set of names and passwords for every person involved, it is not well integrated. And if products use different databases or different administration tools with inconsistent user interfaces, they are not well integrated. On the other hand, if a single name and password can allow the admin to deal with all aspects of the product suite, then a better level of integration has been achieved.

Interoperability – interoperability also can have many meanings. We use the term “interoperability” to refer to the ability of a product to work with other vendors’ products, standards, or technologies. In this context, it means the degree to which the vendor has integrated the individual products or technologies with other products or standards that are important outside of the product family. Extensibility is part of this and measured by the degree to which a vendor allows its technologies and products to be extended for the purposes of its constituents. We think Extensibility is so important that it is given equal status so as to ensure its importance and understanding by both the vendor and the customer. As we move forward, just providing good documentation is inadequate. We are moving to an era when acceptable extensibility will require programmatic access through a well-documented and secure set of APIs.

Usability – accessibility refers to the degree in which the vendor enables the accessibility to its technologies and products to its constituencies. This typically addresses two aspects of usability – the end user view and the administrator view. Sometimes just good documentation can create adequate accessibility. However, we have strong expectations overall regarding well-integrated user interfaces and a high degree of consistency across user interfaces of a product or different products of a vendor. We also expect vendors to follow common, established approaches to user interface design.

We focus on security, functionality, integration, interoperability, and usability for the following key reasons:

Increased People Participation—Human participation in systems at any level is the highest area of cost and potential breakdown for any IT endeavor.

Lack of Security, Functionality, Integration, Interoperability, and Usability—Lack of excellence in any of these areas will only result in increased human participation in deploying and maintaining IT systems.

Increased Identity and Security Exposure to Failure—Increased People Participation and Lack of Security, Functionality, Integration, Interoperability, and Usability not only significantly increases costs, but inevitably leads to mistakes and breakdowns. This will create openings for attack and failure.

Thus, when KuppingerCole evaluates a set of technologies or products from a given vendor, the degree of product security, functionality, integration, interoperability, and usability which the vendor has provided are of the highest importance. This is because lack of excellence in any or all areas will lead to inevitable identity and security breakdowns and weak infrastructure.

Vendor rating

For vendors, additional ratings are used as part of the vendor evaluation. The specific areas we rate for vendors are:

Innovativeness

Market position

Financial strength

Ecosystem

Innovativeness – this is measured as the capability to drive innovation in a direction which aligns with the KuppingerCole understanding of the market segment(s) the vendor is in. Innovation has no value by itself but needs to provide clear benefits to the customer. However, being innovative is an important factor for trust in vendors, because innovative vendors are more likely to remain leading-edge. An important element of this dimension of the KuppingerCole ratings is the support of standardization initiatives if applicable. Driving innovation without standardization frequently leads to lock-in scenarios. Thus, active participation in standardization initiatives adds to the positive rating of innovativeness.

Market position – measures the position the vendor has in the market or the relevant market segments. This is an average rating overall markets in which a vendor is active, e.g. being weak in one segment doesn’t lead to a very low overall rating. This factor considers the vendor’s presence in major markets.

Financial strength – even while KuppingerCole doesn’t consider size to be a value by itself, financial strength is an important factor for customers when making decisions. In general, publicly available financial information is an important factor therein. Companies which are venture-financed are in general more likely to become an acquisition target, with massive risks for the execution of the vendor’s roadmap.

Ecosystem – this dimension looks at the ecosystem of the vendor. It focuses mainly on the partner base of a vendor and the approach the vendor takes to act as a “good citizen” in heterogeneous IT environments.

Again, please note that in KuppingerCole Leadership Compass documents, most of these ratings apply to the specific product and market segment covered in the analysis, not to the overall rating of the vendor

Rating scale for products and vendors

For vendors and product feature areas, we use – beyond the Leadership rating in the various categories – a separate rating with five different levels. These levels are

Strong positive
Outstanding support for the feature area, e.g. product functionality, or outstanding position of the company, e.g. for financial stability.

Positive
Strong support for a feature area or strong position of the company, but with some minor gaps or shortcomings. E.g. for security, this can indicate some gaps in fine-grain control of administrative entitlements. E.g. for market reach, it can indicate the global reach of a partner network, but a rather small number of partners.

Neutral
Acceptable support for feature areas or acceptable position of the company, but with several requirements we set for these areas not being met. E.g. for functionality, this can indicate that some of the major feature areas we are looking for aren’t met, while others are well served. For company ratings, it can indicate, e.g., a regional-only presence.

Weak
Below-average capabilities in the product ratings or significant challenges in the company ratings, such as very small partner ecosystem.

Critical
Major weaknesses in various areas. This rating most commonly applies to company ratings for market position or financial strength, indicating that vendors are very small and have a very low number of customers.

Inclusion and exclusion of vendors

KuppingerCole tries to include all vendors within a specific market segment in their Leadership Compass documents. The scope of the document is global coverage, including vendors which are only active in regional markets such as Germany, Russia, or the US.

However, there might be vendors which don’t appear in a Leadership Compass document due to various reasons:

Limited market visibility: There might be vendors and products which are not on our radar yet, despite our continuous market research and work with advisory customers. This usually is a clear indicator of a lack in Market Leadership.

Denial of participation: Vendors might decide on not participating in our evaluation and refuse to become part of the Leadership Compass document. KuppingerCole tends to include their products anyway as long as sufficient information for evaluation is available, thus providing a comprehensive overview of leaders in the particular market segment.

Lack of information supply: Products of vendors which don’t provide the information we have requested for the Leadership Compass document will not appear in the document unless we have access to sufficient information from other sources.

Borderline classification: Some products might have only small overlap with the market segment we are analyzing. In these cases, we might decide not to include the product in that KuppingerCole Leadership Compass.

The target is providing a comprehensive view of the products in a market segment. KuppingerCole will provide regular updates on their Leadership Compass documents.

We provide a quick overview of vendors not covered and their offerings in chapter Vendors and Market Segments to watch. In that chapter, we also look at some other interesting offerings around the market and in related market segments.

KuppingerCole Analysts support IT professionals with outstanding expertise in defining IT strategies and in relevant decision-making processes. As a leading analyst ompany, KuppingerCole provides first-hand vendor-neutral information. Our services allow you to feel comfortable and secure in taking decisions essential to your business.

KuppingerCole, founded back in 2004, is a global, independent analyst organization headquartered in Europe. We specialize in providing vendor-neutral advice, expertise, thought leadership, and practical relevance in Cybersecurity, Digital Identity & IAM (Identity and Access Management), Cloud Risk and Security, and Artificial Intelligence, as well as for all technologies fostering Digital Transformation. We support companies, corporate users, integrators and software manufacturers in meeting both tactical and strategic challenges and make better decisions for the success of their business. Maintaining a balance between immediate implementation and long-term viability is at the heart of our philosophy.